ReadWrite - OpenStackhttp://readwrite.com/tag/OpenStack
enCopyright 2015 Wearable World Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 31 Mar 2015 13:48:39 -0700OpenStack's Dirty Little Secret: It Doesn't Scale<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>OpenStack remains the open-source community's cloud of choice, mustering tens of thousands of minions as it marches on toward cloudy relevance. That same community has turned OpenStack into a morass of competing projects and priorities, but there's one area where OpenStack dearly needs even more community:</p><p>Helping it scale.</p><p>I talked with Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski this week in advance of his company's announced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mirantis.com/company/press-center/company-news/juniper-networks-mirantis-expand-partnership-proven-software-defined-networking-solution-build-openstack-clouds-scale/">partnership with Juniper Networks</a> to improve OpenStack scalability. It quickly became clear that as popular as OpenStack is, it has a long ways to go before it's truly enterprise class.</p><p>That is, without additional help.</p><h2>Don't Drink, Don't Scale, What Do You Do?&nbsp;</h2><p>As popular as OpenStack has been to talk about, it has been less impressive in terms of deployments. As the <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/openstack/openstack-user-survey-october-2013">October 2013 OpenStack user survey reveals</a>, while companies were shifting from proof of concept to production, that production was relatively small.</p><div tml-image="ci01c9d8f61001c80a" tml-image-caption="Source: OpenStack User Survey, October 2013&amp;nbsp;" tml-render-layout="inline"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI4ODcyNjE0ODkzNTA0NTIy.png" /><figcaption>Source: OpenStack User Survey, October 2013&amp;nbsp;</figcaption></figure></div><p>Similar data doesn't appear to have been released in the <a href="http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-user-survey-insights-november-2014">November 2014 survey results</a>, and perhaps with good reason: The scale isn't very impressive.</p><p>In fact, as I've heard from a range of companies, a dirty secret of OpenStack is that it starts to fall over and can't scale past 30 nodes if you are running plain vanilla main trunk OpenStack software.</p><p>That's a pretty damning indictment, yes, though perhaps less cause for concern than originally appears. After all, as OpenStack pioneer <a href="http://cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/vanilla-openstack-doesnt-exist-and-never-will/">Randy Bias has suggested</a> recently, there's no such thing as "vanilla OpenStack." As such, he posits that those interested in running OpenStack should "Dial into the right level of 'lock-in' that you are comfortable with from a strategic point of view that meets the business requirements."</p><h2>Juniper To The Rescue</h2><p>OpenStack adopters may cite "ability to innovate," "open technology," "cost savings," and "avoiding vendor lock-in" as their top four reasons for embracing OpenStack, but the cloud technology's inherent scalability problems means that anyone that wants to run it at significant scale is going to need to "dial into lock-in."</p><blockquote tml-render-layout="inline"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/04/23/software-defined-networking-sdn">Software-Defined Networking: What It Is, How It Works, Why It Matters</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>As Renski tells me, one significant, but necessary, area of lock-in is giving OpenStack users a&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/04/23/software-defined-networking-sdn">software-defined networking (SDN)</a> fabric to deploy OpenStack clouds at scale. SDNs basically take over the role of directing network traffic between the physical servers used in cloud deployments, rerouting packets on the fly depending on demand and congestion.</p><p>Though Mirantis initially chose VMware to help power this with NSX, they're now adding Juniper's <a href="http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/sdn/contrail/contrail-networking/">Contrail Networking</a>, as well as <a href="http://www.opencontrail.org/">OpenContrail</a> for those that want to minimize lock-in.</p><p>While OpenContrail lags Contrail in terms of functionality, it's still a step up from Mirantis' past dealings with VMware. As Renski told me, "Companies needed NSX to scale. They had to pay the VMware scale tax. No longer."</p><p>Of course, now they have to pay the Juniper scale tax, but at least they have choice, right? Renski continues:</p><blockquote tml-render-layout="inline"><p>NSX is an Achilles heel because Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and networking in the enterprise is typically a big decision traditionally driven by independent groups in the organization, not necessarily the same groups that are making OpenStack-related decisions. Many companies will choose NSX, but many will choose Juniper or other fabrics. And in cases where NSX was not chosen, VIO will end up getting locked out. Hence it is an opportunity for Mirantis to win more business as the Switzerland of Openstack by being pure play and partnering with Juniper Networks &nbsp; &nbsp;</p></blockquote><p>In other words, Mirantis is positioning itself to benefit whichever SDN a company may choose to use to scale OpenStack, though they don't obviate the lock-in problem.</p><h2>The Myth Of No Lock-in</h2><p>Which isn't really a big problem. No matter the software you choose, and whatever its license, there is always lock-in. As my former MongoDB colleague Vijay Vijayasankar notes:</p><p>Going back to Bias' point, the trick is always to determine the amount of lock-in you're willing to accept. For those companies that want OpenStack at scale, they're going to need to embrace a certain amount of lock-in, at least where the SDN is concerned.&nbsp;</p><p>Even if they elect to go with open source pure-play Red Hat, which <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/12/27/openstack-red-hat">I've encouraged in the past</a>, the minute a company opts for a particular distribution, there is lock-in. It's not a simple matter of rip-and-replace to dump one vendor for another, not in a world that has no vanilla distribution.</p><p>In short, you're going to need to lock yourself into some technology to make OpenStack work for you. Better get used to it.</p><p><strong><em>UPDATE: The original version of this article attributed the "dirty little secret" quote to Boris Renski, which is inaccurate. This was the author's words, not Renski's. We apologize for the confusion.</em></strong></p><p><em>Photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/4331271101/">JD Hancock</a></em></p>And solving that problem requires software lock-in.http://readwrite.com/2015/03/19/open-stack-scale-lock-in-sdn
http://readwrite.com/2015/03/19/open-stack-scale-lock-in-sdnCloudThu, 19 Mar 2015 08:59:32 -0700Matt AsayPigs Fly And VMware Vaults Into The Top-3 OpenStack Vendors<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>OpenStack can make for strange bedfellows.</p><p>If any one vendor served as the proprietary bogeyman to motivate the creation of&nbsp;an open source private cloud stack, it’s VMware. For more than a decade, the&nbsp;virtualization giant owned the core infrastructure of Global 2000 data centers, only to have the industry fight back in 2010 with the non-profit OpenStack&nbsp;Foundation. As the industry rallied around open-source OpenStack, proprietary VMware looked to be reeling.</p><p>That was then. This is now.</p><p>Today VMware is emerging as a serious champion of OpenStack, pivoting&nbsp;quickly to prove that they were not going to be the next victim of Clayton&nbsp;Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma.” With <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/01/31/it-losing-battle-cloud-adoption-enterprise">few customers lining up to use vCloud Director</a>, VMware has augmented its otherwise proprietary approach with OpenStack.&nbsp;</p><p>VMware also found an unlikely OpenStack champion: Mirantis, the last remaining&nbsp;private pure-play OpenStack vendor. Mirantis was the first&nbsp;OpenStack vendor to announce support for VMware’s hypervisor technology,&nbsp;vCenter.&nbsp;</p><div tml-image="ci01c25a7030019512" tml-image-caption="Boris Renski" tml-bad-render-layout="inline" tml-render-size="medium" tml-render-position="right"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI2NzYzMTc0OTkyMDMwMzM5.jpg" /><figcaption>Boris Renski</figcaption></figure></div><p>Today, the two companies <a href="http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/mirantis-publishes-vmware-reference-architecture-1978182.htm">published</a><a href="https://www.mirantis.com/company/press-center/company-news/"></a> a Mirantis <a href="https://www.mirantis.com/partners/mirantis-technology-partners/mirantis-partners-vmware/">OpenStack reference&nbsp;architecture</a> for VMware vCenter Server and VMware NSX. Publicly available for&nbsp;download, Mirantis OpenStack lets customers deploy and control workloads that&nbsp;run on VMware vSphere in their VMware vCenter Server clusters within Mirantis&nbsp;OpenStack.&nbsp;</p><p>I spoke with Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO, and board&nbsp;member of the OpenStack Foundation, to understand his company’s coopetition&nbsp;with VMware and how he thinks the virtualization giant will fare with OpenStack&nbsp;customers.</p><p><strong>ReadWrite</strong>:&nbsp;<em>I thought VMware was the enemy of OpenStack–the proprietary private&nbsp;cloud solution?</em></p><p><strong>Renski</strong>:&nbsp;I can’t speak for VMware, but I can assure you that from our perspective as&nbsp;the largest standalone OpenStack vendor, we take VMware very seriously. They&nbsp;recognize that their sophisticated customer base wants to get more value out of&nbsp;their investments in VMware while also wanting the flexibility of working with&nbsp;alternative open source cloud solutions like OpenStack. Big companies are not&nbsp;going to allow a single vendor to determine their computing fate. When Pat&nbsp;Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, gives a keynote address at VMworld committing&nbsp;the company to OpenStack support, it sends a message that they’re here to stay.&nbsp;</p><p>Every infrastructure vendor does “OpenStack something” today. I separate those&nbsp;vendors into two buckets: ones who have a real OpenStack strategy backed by&nbsp;an engineering investment and ones who use OpenStack as a checkmark in their&nbsp;marketing story.&nbsp;</p><p>The more I work with VMware, the more it becomes clear to me&nbsp;that VMware Integrated OpenStack is a strategic move that follows customer&nbsp;demand. This motivates our announcement today, where we have made it easier&nbsp;for VMware customers to run OpenStack alongside VMware’s solutions.</p><p><strong>RW</strong>:&nbsp;The same <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/03/01/vmware-if-amazon-wins-we-all-lose">Gelsinger who moans</a> that , "We all lose if [applications] end up in these commodity public clouds" like Amazon Web Services and, presumably, OpenStack," right? Let's get real.&nbsp;VMware is battling at the technology level to ensure that customers continue to embrace its ESXi&nbsp;hypervisor technology to fight for market share.</p><p><strong>BR</strong>:&nbsp;I’ll concede that, powered by the KVM hypervisor, OpenStack indirectly&nbsp;competes with ESXi.&nbsp;</p><p>But it’s important to remember that cloud infrastructure has&nbsp;two very different use cases. One is the systems administrator use case.&nbsp;Systems administrators want to manage process, policy and security while&nbsp;provisioning infrastructure to their internal customers. Historically, both VMware&nbsp;and Red Hat designed their solutions with the systems administrator use case as&nbsp;their focus–VMware with vCenter and Red Hat with RHEL Virtualization.</p><p>The other is the developer use case. Developers don’t want to deal with the&nbsp;systems administrators or processes; they want direct, self-service access to&nbsp;their infrastructure. Both VMware and Red Hat are effectively using their existing&nbsp;“system administrator” offerings to wedge themselves into organizations to go&nbsp;after developers. The key difference is that VMware is a standard for at least 60%&nbsp;of systems administrators, whereas the RHEL Virtualization footprint in&nbsp;the enterprise is virtually non-existent.</p><p><strong>RW</strong>: It makes sense that an enterprise would look to a company like Mirantis for OpenStack software and support, given that you're a core contributor and have been selling your own OpenStack distribution into the Global&nbsp;2000 market now for more than a year with some noted successes, like the <a href="https://www.mirantis.com/openstack-portal/external-news/ericsson-engages-mirantis-record-breaking-openstack-deal/">$30M&nbsp;Ericsson deal</a>&nbsp;earlier this year. From your perspective, why would&nbsp;an enterprise customer look to VMware for OpenStack? Wouldn't they more likely&nbsp;turn to a “known” OpenStack vendor like Mirantis or Red Hat?</p><p><strong>BR</strong>:&nbsp;Actually, I think VMware will overtake Red Hat in OpenStack sales in 2015.&nbsp;In fact, I doubt Red Hat will manage to stay in the top three in OpenStack&nbsp;revenues and workloads managed next year. Mirantis is seeing great customer&nbsp;traction, and we aim to keep the lead (grins). I predict we will be followed by HP&nbsp;and VMware.&nbsp;</p><p>Yes, VMware. How has VMware vaulted into the top ranks so quickly?&nbsp;</p><p>The main reason&nbsp;OpenStack is so popular is because it enables one to leverage existing&nbsp;infrastructure investments. For example, if you already have storage from&nbsp;NetApp, a load balancer from A10 and vCenter licenses, you can layer&nbsp;OpenStack right on top and have yourself a cloud. This works great for Mirantis&nbsp;because we have no ulterior infrastructure agenda. It poses a problem for&nbsp;vendors who have to compete with existing infrastructure investments.&nbsp;</p><p>Enterprises invested a lot more in VMware infrastructure than they did in RHEL.&nbsp;They will have no reason to switch to “RHEL Integrated OpenStack” when it&nbsp;functions as a rip-and-replace of VMware with no less lock-in. VMware Integrated&nbsp;OpenStack will be a shoo-in.</p><p><em>Lead image courtesy of <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a></em>.</p>Mirantis's Boris Renski on why VMware found an unlikely champion.http://readwrite.com/2014/12/18/vmware-openstack-vendors-mirantis-boris-renski
http://readwrite.com/2014/12/18/vmware-openstack-vendors-mirantis-boris-renskiCloudThu, 18 Dec 2014 08:34:32 -0800Matt AsayOpenStack Is Huge In The Open-Source Cloud—But Maybe Not Huge Enough<!-- tml-version="2" --><div tml-image="ci01bd02ea80019512" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI1MjU5NTY5MjE4NzUzODEw.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>OpenStack rules the open-source cloud. Which may simply mean it's the tallest person in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu">Lilliput</a>.</p><p>With Amazon Web Services (AWS) paving the way for enterprises to move their workloads to the public cloud, <a href="https://gigaom.com/2014/12/10/you-think-aws-doesnt-have-designs-on-in-house-apps-think-again/">including in-house apps</a>, OpenStack’s reign as open cloud sovereign may be short (if not nasty and brutish). The open question is whether OpenStack is a “<a href="https://twitter.com/9muir/status/543141368923967489">poor man’s vCloud</a>” or whether it actually fills a long-term and growing need for big organizations.</p><h2>OpenStack’s Billion-Dollar Promise</h2><p>No one questions OpenStack’s community bona fides. For years it has attracted thousands of developers to the semi-annual OpenStack summits. </p><p>It’s not surprising, therefore, that OpenStack would poll really well in popularity contests. According to a <a href="http://www.zenoss.com/in/ws_State_of_OS_Cloud_RPT.html">new Zenoss survey</a>, 69% of the roughly 400 respondents are using a cloud, and 43% of these respondents are using an open source cloud (e.g., OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, etc.). </p><p>Among these open-source competitors, OpenStack stands out, with 69% choosing the community leader.</p><p>This, in turn, seems to be translating into real revenue.</p><div tml-image="ci01c1dc6e3001c80a" tml-image-caption="" tml-render-size="medium" tml-render-position="right"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI2NjI0NjI5ODE2MDk0Njkw.png" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>For example, <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/09/prweb12144923.htm">451 Research predicts</a> that the OpenStack technology market, which produced revenue of $883 million in 2014, could top $3.3 billion by 2018. </p><p>Most of this OpenStack revenue derives from service providers like Rackspace, which means that much of this revenue comes from Rackspace itself. <a href="https://gigaom.com/2013/08/08/rackspaces-cloud-biz-is-growing-just-not-as-fast-as-amazons/">Rackspace projects</a> its OpenStack-based public cloud business will hit a $1 billion run rate by early 2016, though based on current growth it's unclear how it gets to that number.</p><p>For its part, Red Hat got into the OpenStack game in earnest in 2013, but has publicly said it wouldn’t make much OpenStack revenue in 2014. And it hasn’t. But that may change, as I argue below.</p><p>Regardless, even $3.3 billion in OpenStack revenue by 2018 simply means that OpenStack will remain a distant third place to AWS (and Microsoft Azure, not to mention Google) forever.</p><p>There are good reasons for this.</p><h2>Clouding The Cloud</h2><p>After all, according to the Zenoss survey, the top three benefits expected from open source cloud deployments included lower cost of ownership (71.1%), agility (55.6%) and better uptime (46.7%). At least two of those (agility and uptime) are almost certainly more consistently delivered by AWS rather than some in-house team fiddling OpenStack nobs and gears.</p><p>One primary reason for shifting to public cloud services is to get away from a cumbersome, IT-driven service provisioning. It’s not clear how OpenStack changes this much. As one person told me, OpenStack is “for IT folks that want to stay on-prem, but fool their execs that they are doing ‘Cloud’.”</p><p>Or as Andy Jassy, Amazon’s cloud chief, <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-private-cloud-not-real-cloud-offering/">puts it</a>:</p><blockquote><p>If you look deep into what [private cloud vendors] are offering, you will see that it's basically an internal data center that is virtualized and has some management tools. Organizations that have private cloud systems will have missed out on all the advantages and benefits of going into the cloud.</p></blockquote><p>That’s hardly a recipe for long-term success, even if Dell’s <a href="https://twitter.com/josephajacks/status/543141209913303041">Joseph Jacks correctly surmises</a> that OpenStack “will be the defacto [infrastructure-as-a-service] fabric for self-service cloud consumers in enterprise IT for some time to come.”</p><h2>Red Hat To The Rescue?</h2><p>As such, it’s highly likely that many workloads will stay behind the corporate firewall for the foreseeable future. In such a world, OpenStack’s big proponents can expect to make a lot of money. Foremost among these will be Red Hat.</p><p>Red Hat, more than any of the other OpenStack vendors, has a long history of hardening open-source code and selling it to the enterprise. </p><p>This, perhaps more than anything else, is what OpenStack needs today. As Gartner analyst <a href="https://twitter.com/martenmickos/status/516101825838063616">Lydia Leong has suggested</a>, OpenStack desperately needs a "core" that is "small, rock-solid stable, and readily extensible."</p><p>She <a href="http://cloudpundit.com/2014/05/14/reflections-on-the-openstack-atlanta-summit/">goes on</a>:</p><blockquote><p>There's much work to be done still, but things are grinding onwards in an encouraging fashion. The will to solve the common problems of installs, upgrades, and networking seems to have permeated the community sufficiently that these basic elements of usability and stability are getting into the core. The involvement of larger vendors has created a collective determination to do what it takes to make enterprise adoption of OpenStack possible, in due time.</p></blockquote><p>In just a few years, Red Hat has gone from zero involvement to <a href="http://stackalytics.com/">top contributor</a> to OpenStack, putting it in a great position to ensure OpenStack gets the “rock-solid core” it requires. </p><div tml-image="ci01c1dca1800199de" tml-image-caption="Credit: Stackalytics" tml-render-size="medium" tml-render-position="right"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI2NjI0ODUwMjAxNTgyMDQ2.png" /><figcaption>Credit: Stackalytics</figcaption></figure></div><p>Meanwhile, whether you think private clouds are fake or real, enterprises have been turning to OpenStack to build private clouds, as <a href="http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-user-survey-insights-november-2014http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-user-survey-insights-november-2014">OpenStack survey data shows</a>. Between November 2013 and November 2014, OpenStack saw production deployments jump considerably, moving from 32% to 46% of survey respondents. </p><p>Open source being open source, “production” doesn’t necessarily translate into “revenue” for OpenStack vendors. Even if it did, this increased adoption almost certainly won’t add up to the $5 billion in annual revenue that AWS <a href="http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works">reportedly</a> already generates. </p><p>Still, “eking out” a few billion of revenue from companies too skittish to leave their data centers behind? That’s revenue that Red Hat will gladly take.</p><p><em>Lead photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/incredibleguy/6937250243">George Thomas</a></em></p>$1 billion in private-cloud revenue pales next to AWS.http://readwrite.com/2014/12/12/openstack-big-enough-private-cloud-vs-public-cloud
http://readwrite.com/2014/12/12/openstack-big-enough-private-cloud-vs-public-cloudCloudFri, 12 Dec 2014 10:19:01 -0800Matt AsayCan We Please Stop Acting Like Public-Cloud Cost Comparisons Matter?<!-- tml-version="2" --><div tml-image="ci01bdc0fb800199de" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI1NDY4NTQ4OTA1NTc3MDkx.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Bless the OpenStack crowd for taking the trouble to figure out the exact moment when it becomes cost effective to run your Amazon Web Services workload in a private cloud ($7,644/month, as <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/2833474/private-cloud/is-there-a-point-where-a-private-cloud-is-cheaper-than-the-public-cloud.html">Brandon Butler reports</a>). If only that number mattered.</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/07/16/amazon-cloud-aws-runaway-growth">Amazon's Cloud Is The Fastest-Growing Software Business In History</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>After all, public cloud computing has never really been a matter of shaving hard costs associated with compute and storage. Instead, public cloud computing is a matter of <a href="http://readwrite.com/2012/12/20/cloud-convenience-checkmates-concerns">developer convenience</a> and, ultimately, productivity. That isn’t something that shows up in the $7,644 number.</p><h2>Apples And Oranges</h2><p>Private cloud vendors seem to be stuck in the past, selling a vision of IT cost savings in a world that increasingly bypasses IT. Even the most cursory glance at the data for Shadow IT—all those computational installations that happen without centralized approval from the IT department—tells us that enterprises route around IT. </p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/04/25/shadow-it-cloud-open-source-developers">Shadow IT: Far Bigger, Less Manageable And More Important Than You Think</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>In fact, <a href="https://twitter.com/ambassadorcio/status/519120132644540416">Gartner projects</a> that 38% of technology purchases already happen outside IT, a number that will balloon to 50% by 2017. </p><p>In light of this reduced relevance for IT, bean-counting server costs seems antiquated and counterproductive. Rather than focus on cutting IT costs, savvy enterprises are looking for ways to grow revenue.&nbsp;</p><p>Red Hat CEO <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2688724/opensource-subnet/red-hat-ceo-whitehurst-on-devops-apps-and-infrastructure.html">Jim Whitehurst points out</a> that infrastructure is "100% cost-driven," with no upside to cutting costs. Whereas if companies "double the productivity of their developers," he goes on, they can develop money-making apps and thus "can grow revenues and the bottom line.... That's where CIOs&nbsp;<em>SHOULD</em> be focusing."</p><h2>Making Developers Happy</h2><p>While self-serving, this has been Amazon’s message from the beginning. AWS executives have long pilloried the very idea of “private cloud” as inimical to true cloud productivity. Amazon Web Services SVP <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-private-cloud-not-real-cloud-offering-2062062946/">Andy Jassy pillories</a> private clouds, arguing that&nbsp;</p><blockquote><p>If you look deep into what [private cloud vendors] are offering, you will see that it's basically an internal data center that is virtualized and has some management tools. Organizations that have private cloud systems will have missed out on all the advantages and benefits of going into the cloud.</p></blockquote><p>Modern enterprises need to embrace this new reality. IDC, long a conservative ally with IT, is now singing the developer song in a <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=244606">new report</a>:</p><blockquote><p>”Developers, developers, developers, developers!" (thank you, Steve Ballmer) will be the most strategic mantra for third platform competitors in 2014—for the next two decades, the biggest winners in the industry will be those that can capture the hearts and minds of this next generation of innovators over the next two years. Miss the developers, miss the market.</p></blockquote><p>To attract developers, enterprises must shift how they think about technology. Smart enterprises recognize that software doesn’t make developers productive; rather, developers make software productive. The more flexible the hardware and software licensing developers get to use, the stronger their productivity. </p><p>While this definitely means more public cloud resources, it also entails open source, as ActiveState’s <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/2825059/developer/the-coming-war-for-developers.html">Bernard Golden writes</a>:</p><blockquote><p>NoSQL, Docker, Cloud Foundry and OpenShift will power third-platform applications. All rise from open source, becoming comfortable with open source is a core capability for the future—and by comfortable, I mean understanding the dynamics of open source and being involved in its relevant communities. This isn't a world of simply viewing an open source vendor as a less expensive version of a proprietary software company.</p></blockquote><p>Again, the emphasis that developer-centric computing isn’t about lower costs. It’s about improving output, which is a function of flexibility. </p><h2>The Future Is Ephemeral</h2><p>Private cloud vendors, like proprietary software vendors before them, want enterprises to believe that there’s value in permanent ownership. But given how fast technology is moving, being saddled with hardware and software “assets” is a liability. It constrains innovation because it dampens companies’ ability to iterate, as AWS data science GM <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/09/05/big-data-failure-learning-cloud">Matt Wood told me</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Those that go out and buy expensive infrastructure find that the problem scope and domain shift really quickly. By the time they get around to answering the original question, the business has moved on. You need an environment that is flexible and allows you to quickly respond to changing big data requirements. Your resource mix is continually evolving—if you buy infrastructure it's almost immediately irrelevant to your business because it's frozen in time. It's solving a problem you may not have or care about any more.</p></blockquote><p>Will the price of such iteration-friendly infrastructure sometimes cost more? Of course it will. But that’s measuring costs without offsetting them with productivity gains. In the modern enterprise, developers are the determining factor in whether you succeed or fail.&nbsp;</p><p>That may cost more than $7,644 per month. But that’s beside the point.</p><p><em>Lead image by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_goddard/6559333795">NASA Goddard Space Flight Center</a></em></p>They completely miss the point.http://readwrite.com/2014/10/23/public-cloud-private-cloud-stop-comparing-costs
http://readwrite.com/2014/10/23/public-cloud-private-cloud-stop-comparing-costsCloudThu, 23 Oct 2014 13:19:34 -0700Matt AsayOpenStack Gets A $100M Vote Of Confidence—But Amazon Is Waiting<!-- tml-version="2" --><div tml-image="ci01bda6b9e001efe2" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI1NDM5NjgxMDg4MjAzMzk1.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Only one open-source company that's so far managed to break $1 billion in annual revenue. But that's not stopping venture capitalists from spreading billions around in the hopes of helping create the next Red Hat.</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/06/11/openstack-express-mirantis-open-source-cloud">The Open-Source Cloud Takes A Step Toward Simplicity</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Too bad Amazon Web Services (AWS) is out there waiting for them.&nbsp;</p><h2>Let The Venture Money Flow!</h2><p>Over the past two years, the sums pouring into open-source enterprise software companies have been remarkable. Last year MongoDB (full disclosure: my employer) raised $150 million at a reported $1.2 billion valuation, while NoSQL peer DataStax took in another $106 million, valuing the company at $830 million.</p><p>Meanwhile in Hadoop Land, investors handed Hortonworks $100 million at a reported $1 billion valuation, after which Cloudera pulled in a monster $900 million round, most of it from Intel, at a nosebleed valuation reported to be around $4.1 billion.&nbsp;</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/red-hat-openstack-mirantis-rhel-support">Red Hat May Be Stacking The Deck Against Its OpenStack Rivals</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>And we're not done yet. On Tuesday, Mirantis—which offers software and support for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack">OpenStack</a>, a collection of open-source tools companies can use to build their own clouds—<a href="https://www.mirantis.com/company/press-center/company-news/">raised $100 million</a>&nbsp;from a variety of investors including Intel Capital and Ericsson.&nbsp;Nobody disclosed a valuation.</p><p>This kind of Oprah money has fewer companies to flow into these days. Many standalone OpenStack and open-source cloud startups have already been gobbled up by large vendors, mostly for nominal sums. Oracle scooped up Nimbulus last year. HP recently bought Eucalytpus, EMC acquired Cloudscaling and Cisco bought Metacloud.</p><p>That leaves Mirantis standing in an industry with some very big players as competitors, in a market that seems to be Amazon's to lose.&nbsp;</p><p>Mirantis, of course, is not the only open source company competing with Amazon. In a world increasingly gone cloud, <em>every</em>&nbsp;software vendor, open source or otherwise, competes with AWS.</p><h2>Amazon: The New Microsoft?</h2><p>There must be something in the water around Seattle, as the area keeps breeding hegemons. Microsoft dominated desktop and data center computing for decades. Now it's Amazon's turn.</p><p>Amazon Web Services is perhaps the <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/07/16/amazon-cloud-aws-runaway-growth">fastest-growing software business in history</a>, ramping to $1 billion and beyond at a torrid pace, as Pacific Crest Securities estimates:</p><div tml-image="ci01a87e1ee791860f" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a1.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIxNDI3Mjk0Mjk3MzU5ODg1.png" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Now that Amazon CTO <a href="http://recode.net/2014/07/19/talking-the-cloud-business-with-amazon-cto-werner-vogels/">Werner Vogels has made it clear</a> that Amazon is in the "enterprise pain management" business, and won't be content to merely provide infrastructure services, no area of software is safe from AWS' deflationary grasp. Yet hard as it may be to compete against AWS with a proprietary licensing model, in some ways it's harder with an open source model.&nbsp;</p><p>Just ask MySQL, once a burgeoning developer of the popular open-source database of the same name.</p><p>At the time of its $1 billion acquisition by Sun in 2008, MySQL was doing roughly $100 million in sales. That's not bad, but it pales in comparison to how much AWS was making on that same MySQL code, both in terms of RDS and <a href="https://twitter.com/jdub/status/524557722386055168">MySQL-related EC2 revenue</a>.&nbsp;</p><p>While there are <a href="http://blogs.gartner.com/chris-gaun/amazons-cloud-revenue-is-important-information-for-potential-customers/">no official numbers from AWS on its cloud business</a>, I've heard from inside sources that AWS made several hundred million in revenue at the time of the MySQL acquisition, and I would venture that its RDS + MySQL-related EC2 revenue is now approaching the $1 billion mark.</p><p>It's not just MySQL, of course. Amazon is also the world's largest Linux vendor, the largest Hadoop vendor and so on. Importantly, AWS has done what no open source company has ever managed to do: make money off&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;otherwise free open-source software. By turning open source software into managed services, AWS can turn any open-source code into cash.</p><h2>A Quixotic Mirantis Counterattack</h2><div tml-image="ci01bd8e005001efe2" tml-image-caption="Adrian Ionel" tml-render-size="small" tml-render-position="right"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI1NDEyNDgxMDYwMzQ2MzM0.jpg" /><figcaption>Adrian Ionel</figcaption></figure></div><p>Now Mirantis and its investors hope to stem that tide. The good news is that Amazon has no interest (so far) in selling OpenStack private cloud services.&nbsp;</p><p>That's also the bad news.</p><p>When I talked to Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel about why VCs would pour money into an AWS competitor, he didn't hold back:</p><blockquote><p>We have seen strong customer traction and out-sized business results, and we are working with some of the best brands in the world, including Home Depot, Wells Fargo, and PayPal. Earlier this year, we closed the largest OpenStack deal in history with Ericsson (more than $30 million in software licensing revenues over five years). We are becoming known as a the breakaway independent OpenStack leader, and it’s exciting to see the momentum build.</p></blockquote><p>That may be true, but it's not yet clear that Mirantis and its 450 engineers have much chance against AWS. Ionel is quick to point out that Mirantis can hold its own against other OpenStack contenders like VMware, HP, Oracle, Red Hat and possibly Cisco-via-Metacloud: "We already have the largest OpenStack customer base of any vendor, and dominate Web/SaaS, service provider, and enterprise markets."&nbsp;</p><p>He further notes, "Customers routinely tell us that they chose Mirantis because there was no proprietary agenda, which means so that they can avoid the lock-in of traditional IT." But those same customers are actively embracing AWS, with <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2824508/cloud-computing/ges-head-of-it-were-going-all-in-with-the-public-cloud.html">GE the latest poster child</a>.</p><h2>Fighting The AWS Beast</h2><p>In fact, as I've argued before, <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/12/27/openstack-red-hat">OpenStack's best chance at relevance is likely Red Hat</a>, which has the broad open source portfolio to make it a potential contender against Amazon's array of services. Ionel disagrees, saying that "The 'benevolent dictator' model may be past its prime," and that "Other models can be more powerful, like an open, market-driven meritocracy combined with deep user engagement in R&amp;D."</p><p>This still doesn't answer the AWS threat. To that Ionel retorted,&nbsp;</p><blockquote><p>OpenStack lets them fine-tune their cloud to their needs. By contrast, AWS is a much simpler "one-size-fits-all" platform which standardizes everything to the lowest possible denominator for its customers. Although this makes sense for some enterprises and workloads, it cannot make sense for all of them.</p></blockquote><p>Maybe, maybe not. But I seriously doubt most enterprises today are concerned with the "one-size-fits-all" epithet and instead view it as a convenient way to get to the cloud fast. Until OpenStack can deliver a deep cloud experience as easily as AWS does, $100 million isn't nearly enough.</p><p><em>Lead photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kayugee/14900312506">kayugee</a></em></p>The Amazon cloud is everywhere.http://readwrite.com/2014/10/22/openstack-funding-amazon-in-waiting-mirantis
http://readwrite.com/2014/10/22/openstack-funding-amazon-in-waiting-mirantisCloudWed, 22 Oct 2014 06:23:15 -0700Matt AsayWhy The Internet of Things Has To Be Open Sourced<!-- tml-version="2" --><div tml-image="ci01bd30c200012a83" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI1MzA5OTczMzQ0Mjk5NjUx.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>In a world increasingly shaped by software, developers are market makers. Nowhere is this more true than in the burgeoning Internet of Things market.&nbsp;</p><blockquote><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/06/27/internet-of-things-developers-jobs-opportunity">The Internet Of Things Will Need Millions Of Developers By 2020</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Currently riddled by a mess of competing proprietary standards, the winner in the Internet of Things will be the one that goes furthest to make developers' lives easier.&nbsp;</p><h2>Sourcing Developers</h2><p>Though <a href="http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2014/10/kingmakers-internet-things/?utm_source=VisionMobile+subscriber+list&amp;utm_campaign=a11fce13ab-2014_10+October+Newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_efe0e34ffa-a11fce13ab-394584538">VisionMobile estimates</a> put the total Internet of Things developer population at 3.2 million today, only a fraction of those are dedicated to IoT. Even so, this dedicated core of developers will more than double by 2015, and increase more than tenfold by 2020, according to VisionMobile:</p><div tml-image="ci01a8bfd7cc53860b" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTE4MDAzNDE3OTY0MTE5NTY2.jpg" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>For those trying to reach them, there is no particular center of gravity:</p><div tml-image="ci01bd19e240019512" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI1Mjg0ODIzMzU4MDIwMDYy.png" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>This presents both opportunity and challenge to those hoping to harness developer productivity, as VisionMobile points out:</p><blockquote><p>[Internet of Things] developers are everywhere—from Silicon Valley to Hanoi and Kuala Lumpur, from small towns to mega-cities. There is no single area that dominates [Internet of Things] innovation in terms of developer population. This is good news for entrepreneurs all over the world. You don’t need to be in the right spot, because there isn’t any.</p></blockquote><p>That's the good news. The bad news is that with such a diffuse developer population, most of which is sequestered in startups of fewer than 50 people, reaching them becomes extremely difficult. In a recent survey, 50% of developers told VisionMobile their primary way of getting information is through online communities.</p><p>Which is just one more reason to believe the only way to reach Internet of Things developers effectively is through open source.</p><h2>Opening Up The Internet Of Things</h2><p>Developers have turned to open source and cloud computing to escape artificial constraints on their productivity, and the same will be true in the Internet of Things.</p><p><a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/standard-behavior-in-an-internet-goldrush/?_php=true&amp;_type=blogs&amp;_r=0">Big companies hoping to compete for Internet of Things dollars</a> clearly understand this. Among the various technology standards competing for attention, various open source alternatives are on the rise, including one from the very promising <a href="https://allseenalliance.org/about/why-allseen">AllSeen Alliance</a>.</p><p>Bosch, a significant contender and a member of AllSeen, <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/stefferber/20141015-eclipse-webinarinfomodels">describes</a> why open source is so important in its proposal for the <a href="http://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/vorto">Vorto project</a>, which aims to standardize IoT information models:</p><div tml-image="ci01bd1a139001c80a" tml-image-caption=""><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI1Mjg1MDM1NDIyMDY3MzMx.png" /><figcaption></figcaption></figure></div><p>Drilling into those assumptions, Bosch notes:</p><ul><li>Consumers want to use a large variety of devices in their ecosystem and don‘t want to be limited to using devices of one specific vendor.&nbsp;</li><li>Vendors of IoT devices want to increase the number of ecosystems where their devices can be integrated.&nbsp;</li><li>Vendors of IoT platforms want to integrate as much as devices as possible into their ecosystem without major effort.</li><li>Application developers want to support a broad range of devices without a need to develop vendor specific code.</li></ul><p>All of these reasons point to open source. And yet, as ARM's <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/02/hurdles-to-the-internet-of-things-prove-more-social-than-technical.html">Bill Curtis has pointed out</a>, "Because most Internet standards are too complex for the constrained devices in the [Internet of Things], these devices tend to run proprietary protocols, creating data silos." Because of <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/03/03/internet-things-money">the proliferation of "standards,"</a> proprietary and open source, device manufacturers are tightly coupling proprietary sensors into proprietary networks.</p><p>This can't last.&nbsp;</p><h2>And The Winner Is ...</h2><p>It's way too soon to declare a winner in the Internet of Things. It's too new and there's far too much noise around competing standards.</p><p>Ironically, most of the noise today comes from competing open source standardization efforts, with a recent ruckus caused by Intel refusing to join AllSeen and Broadcom dropping out of the Open Interconnect Consortium. Both bailed the respective consortia&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cbronline.com/news/tech/software/opensource/broadcom-quits-intels-open-interconnect-consortium-4402726">because of IP issues</a>.</p><p>But let's be clear: None of these companies lining up to join this or that foundation will prove dispositive in cementing any particular standard as <em>the</em> open source standard. Developers do that.</p><p>And developers are attracted by tools and platforms that make them more productive, fast. Getting a marquee list of donors to a foundation is meaningless if the foundation doesn't generate code that appeals to developers. (Just ask OpenStack, which continues to attract more vendors than buyers/developers, as <a href="https://twitter.com/mappingbabel/status/522182251010736128">Jack Clark highlights</a>.)</p><p>Companies will win over Internet of Things not in the boardroom, but on the command line. The consortium that gets excellent code to market first, with a community that provides great documentation and an inviting atmosphere, will win. So far, only AllSeen has done that, with <a href="https://allseenalliance.org/source-code">code available for download today</a>. Whether it will retain that advantage is for developers to decide.</p><p><em>Lead image via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2712985992">woodleywonderworks</a></em></p>Developers aren't going to go for proprietary standards.http://readwrite.com/2014/10/17/internet-of-things-open-source-iot-developers
http://readwrite.com/2014/10/17/internet-of-things-open-source-iot-developersHackFri, 17 Oct 2014 07:00:00 -0700Matt AsayA Database David Takes On The Amazon Goliath—Minus The Slingshot<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>Amazon Web Services (AWS) sets the pace for innovation in cloud and sets pricing. For all of the "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5n21zHPm8">Everything is awesome!</a>" singing surrounding the <a href="http://readwrite.com/tag/openstack">open-source cloud-computing platform OpenStack</a>, it still lags AWS in almost every feature that cloud customers value.</p><p>Most attempts to improve OpenStack come from longtime open-source contributors like Red Hat. But one new entrant, Tesora, is something of a johnny-come-lately to open source. Last week,&nbsp;<a href="http://tesora.com/news/press-releases/tesora-open-sources-its-leading-database-virtualization-engine-technology">Tesora announced</a> that it was open sourcing its previously proprietary database virtualization engine as part of its commitment to OpenStack's Trove database-as-a-service (DBaaS) project. Like other DBaaS offerings, Trove aims to provide customers with appropriate levels of database capacity depending on their requirements at any given time without tying them to particular database servers.</p><p>While Tesora still has much to prove, it claims that OpenStack's DBaaS now delivers superior functionality to Amazon's competing DBaaS, known as RDS.&nbsp;But "superior functionality" may not be enough to unseat the AWS behemoth.&nbsp;</p><h2>Just How Big&nbsp;<em>Is</em> AWS?</h2><p>After all, AWS is not merely the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing. As of today, it's the <em>only</em> gorilla. According to new <a href="http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2014/06/16/amazon-maintains-cloud-lead-could-go-after-enterprise-says-evercore/">research from research firm Evercore</a>, AWS claimed&nbsp;37% of the $9 billion infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in 2013. That commanding lead is only going to become more pronounced, as the IaaS market is growing at a 45% clip, while AWS is growing by 60%.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b4231c60018266"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyNzYxNjk0MDg1Njc3Njcw.png" /></figure></div><p>Impressive as its revenue numbers are, money doesn't tell the whole story, as Evercore analyst Ken Sena writes:</p><blockquote><p>When looked at on the basis of capacity (as opposed to revenues), Amazon has more than five times all the other cloud IaaS providers combined, which includes Microsoft, Google, IBM SoftLayer, Verizon Terremark, Rackspace, VMware, HP, GoGrid, Joyent, Dimension Data, CSC, Fujitsu, Virtustream, and CenturyLink (Gartner source). In addition, on the basis of revenues, AWS still has over three times the scale of Azure, Google, and Rackspace.</p></blockquote><p>Nor are competitors' price cuts making much of an impact on AWS, according to Sena:</p><blockquote><p>AWS dropped prices on AWS 13 separate times over 2013, flat with 2012, but still equal to the number of reductions by Azure, Google, and Rackspace, combined. These continuous pricing cuts have helped Amazon stay a step ahead of their competition, allowing it to gain share in the marketplace. This has led to Amazon increasing share from 24% in 2010 to 39% of the IaaS market according to Gartner by 2013.</p></blockquote><p>Even so, some competitors are gearing up to mount a serious challenge. Google, in particular, has the heft and margin to compete aggressively with AWS. Already it has pulled key AWS personnel like Miles Ward (<a href="https://twitter.com/milesward">@milesward</a>) to its roster (Ward is perhaps even more prominent for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-oiZqJ88M">his significant role with Obama's technology team</a> in 2012), and shows no signs of slowing as <a href="http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3525480/google-battles-amazon-for-corporate-clouds/">it battles AWS for corporate clouds</a>.</p><h2>Getting Into The Open Source Groove</h2><p>But maybe, just maybe the right way to beat AWS isn't with an equally proprietary stack, but with open source instead. That's the OpenStack approach, and it may have received a significant boost on the database side from Tesora's contribution. While database comes in a distant third to compute and storage in the hierarchy of users' needs, it's still an important component of the AWS cloud stack. If OpenStack is going to go toe-to-toe with Amazon, it needs to match or beat its database offering.</p><p>First things first, however. Before Tesora can ride the OpenStack wave, it needs to establish its open source bona fides. That's how open source works: currency is written in code, and you only get to spend once you've contributed a significant amount. In this area, Tesora is making progress. For the Icehouse release of OpenStack, Tesora ranked #71 in contributions. For the latest Juno release, it's #18, according to <a href="http://www.stackalytics.com/?release=juno">OpenStack contributor data</a>.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b4231c80028266"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyNzYxNjk0NjIyNjA4NjY1.png" /></figure></div><p>While still a far cry from HP (#1 in the latest release) and Red Hat (#2), it's progress for a company that started out as a proprietary software company (then known as Parelastic) and has only lately found its way to open source.&nbsp;</p><p>Tesora co-founder and CTO Amrith Kumar underlines the company's "total commitment to open source," and celebrates Trove's inclusion as a&nbsp;mainstream OpenStack project. But will either be enough?</p><h2>Open Source + Feature Richness = Win?</h2><p>As Kumar told me, "A lot of OpenStack is about essentially knocking off features that customers get with AWS," which thus far hasn't been enough. Tesora, he said, has upped OpenStack's database game by ...</p><blockquote><p>bringing to OpenStack and Trove some key features for DBaaS around horizontal scale-out that RDS doesn’t yet offer.&nbsp;We’re excited about getting ahead of Amazon with innovation. You can scale almost infinitely with our technology and do some amazing things around packing VMs more densely than you can on RDS. We have even demonstrated that we can produce better than linear scalability with RDS instances in the Amazon cloud!</p></blockquote><p>That's nice—but again, is it enough? And is DBaaS the right place to start?</p><p>Maybe not, according to data in <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/openstack-catching-up-to-vmware-as-preferred-private-cloud-platform-according-to-new-developer-survey-from-tesora-2014-06-18">Tesora's own survey</a>. Survey respondents tout OpenStack as second only to VMware as the preferred private cloud platform (~15% are using VMware’s vCloud while 11% were already running OpenStack private clouds), and Google Compute Engine (in use at 16% of respondents) appears to be making gains against AWS (24%). Such data suggests that enterprises might be open to change.</p><p>Yet just under&nbsp;10% of respondents rely on a DBaaS today, and a mere 11% more expect to implement&nbsp;a DBaaS in a private cloud within the next 24 months. Whatever the functionality Tesora's contribution brings to OpenStack, then, it may not be enough.&nbsp;</p><p>Kumar acknowledges that a lot of work remains to be done, and indicates that "the transition to DBaaS will probably accelerate as the market catches up with early adopters and more people become familiar with the database as a service model as well as the capabilities of OpenStack Trove." </p><p>But it's unclear that he's right.</p><h2>Convenience Wins</h2><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/06/03/public-cloud-dominates-enterprise-cloud">In Big Companies, The Public Cloud Is Leaving The Private Cloud In The Dust</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>As <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/06/03/public-cloud-dominates-enterprise-cloud#feed=/author/matt-asay&amp;awesm=~oHyNRXXGIfarOq">I wrote recently</a>, the private cloud keeps getting trounced by public cloud and, specifically, AWS. As nice as it sounds to run private infrastructure like a public cloud, it turns out to be really, really hard. AWS keeps booming because it removes all that complexity and makes buying infrastructure, including databases, as simple as entering a credit card number.&nbsp;</p><p>Tesora is doing the right thing by contributing code to make OpenStack better. But the company and the project continue to have a serious uphill battle in front of them, with the giant Amazon standing at the top of the hill.</p><p><em>Lead image courtesy of <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com">Shutterstock</a></em></p>Tesora hopes its OpenStack contributions will give it an edge on Amazon, but this may be wishful thinking at best.http://readwrite.com/2014/06/19/tesora-openstack-aws-amazon-cloud
http://readwrite.com/2014/06/19/tesora-openstack-aws-amazon-cloudCloudThu, 19 Jun 2014 07:08:00 -0700Matt AsayThe Open-Source Cloud Takes A Step Toward Simplicity<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>The open-source cloud platform OpenStack can be a pain to deploy. Of course, building your own cloud infrastructure—which includes wrangling all the software components on your own hardware or on servers from a public cloud provider like Amazon—is always bound to be, right?</p><p>Mirantis hopes to change that with <a href="express.mirantis.com">OpenStack Express</a>, an OpenStack-as-a-service offering hosted on IBM's Softlayer infrastructure. It's intended to make deploying OpenStack easier and faster, freeing developers to focus on their applications. IBM provides the data center underpinnings, and Mirantis provides the software and 24/7 support for the self-service, on-demand offering, the first of its kind in the OpenStack world.</p><p>"What Amazon does for public clouds, we do for private clouds," said Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis. OpenStack Express essentially lets you rent bare-metal servers that don't get shared with other customers, quickly deploy software, and manage everything via a console.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/red-hat-openstack-mirantis-rhel-support">Red Hat May Be Stacking The Deck Against Its OpenStack Rivals</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Though there are lots of other OpenStack providers—Red Hat, HP, IBM, and others—Mirantis is unique in that its business is entirely based on OpenStack. The company started out as a system integrator, working closely with Red Hat, but when Mirantis decided to offer its own OpenStack distribution that competes with Red Hat, the relationship went sour.</p><p>In Red Hat's announcement of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/6/red-hat-unveils-rhel-7">Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7</a>, the open source stalwart's most significant release&nbsp;in years, Mirantis was <a href="http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/6/red-hat-enterprise-operating-system-vision-embraced">noticeably missing</a> as a partner. Mirantis OpenStack Express runs on CentOS, a clone of Red Hat's flagship "enterprise Linux."</p><h2>The Time And Cost of Deploying OpenStack</h2><p>Without OpenStack Express, the routine goes like this: buy servers, assign someone to run the project, buy the software and system integration services, and get to work. “Four to eight weeks later, you will have spent $150,000 to $200,000 at least to get to that production deployment," Ionel said. “We replace all that in a mouse click.”</p><p>The Mirantis alternative starts at $60 a day, without a long term contract, and can be cancelled at any time, Ionel said.</p><p>Binh Phan, a senior security architect at McAfee, has been testing OpenStack Express for the past two months. "I am pretty impressed with what the Mirantis folks have done. It has real potential," he said.&nbsp;</p><p>Phan wants to build a 100% cloud-based system for McAfee's next generation firewall that potential customers can use &nbsp;for demos and testing.&nbsp;Rather than sending potential customers equipment to test on, he hopes to simulate a real-world environment via an OpenStack cloud. "If I can give them access to OpenStack Express and test things with them, without having to ship hardware to premises, it would shorten the sales cycle," he said. “It could help the customer experience, and help close sales faster.”</p><p>Before using OpenStack Exprss, Phan used Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). While acknowledging that it’s difficult to draw direct comparisons, he said that on EC2, he ran into difficulty while creating a "custom image"—the operating system and other resources needed to start up a virtual server "instance" in the cloud.</p><p>“We use a custom version of Linux for our product, and Amazon doesn’t make that easy,” he said. With Mirantis, he can make changes to the source code. “It’s open. I can get more information and reverse engineer and deep dive if I have to, vs. Amazon, which is a black box. They don’t allow us to upload and create our own images.”</p><p>In the beginning, he found that OpenStack Express was set up to use flat networking, but for his purposes, he needed the product to support network segmentation and subnets. About a month after he asked for it, Mirantis had added what he needed. “I was impressed with how quickly they added that support,” he said. "It would have taken months or years with some vendors."</p><p><em>Lead image by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jmv/288286250/in/photolist-rtxsA-5CSQWB-7n2F2m-4ECoqb-eFVucu-gx6eHR-7N2FF4-hYp2SS-8ePq1i-5ZnPeZ-5cR8ry-6DsESv-ee9S98-fRSKNS-fecWVr-5BjGQt-fWgXU5-fecMMc-6eTpSw-8u5aVN-6bvF1d-8b5j88-cn3W7A-7DK8NZ-7gh2U1-6fFfE8-ntzdgy-7X7Zay-83Guqx-jHjzci-8sdc5y-dyQzaC-7XXC85-7dCcQv-7jM3yZ-iRVoM1-9hTdX7-5nA1D3-dAz4V6-8nphtS-bCjkaa-6x9Vi8-a6ZhJh-jmJHrH-mMXHxK-fu7dHo-bA6Aay-6QwbHM-9hDwQc-79NdMf">Flickr user jmv</a>, CC 2.0</em></p>Mirantis launches the notoriously complicated OpenStack as a turnkey, pay-as-you-go service.http://readwrite.com/2014/06/11/openstack-express-mirantis-open-source-cloud
http://readwrite.com/2014/06/11/openstack-express-mirantis-open-source-cloudCloudWed, 11 Jun 2014 07:07:00 -0700Jodi MardesichOpenStack Deployments Are Up, And So Is Ubuntu—But Will It Stick?<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>The OpenStack faithful gathered in Atlanta this week, and their faith is leading to serious action in the form of real-world deployments.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/red-hat-openstack-mirantis-rhel-support">Red Hat May Be Stacking The Deck Against Its Open Stack Rivals</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>For a long time, the most potent criticism of OpenStack was that it was long on hype and short on production deployments. No more. According to the <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey">latest OpenStack survey</a>, there are over 506 OpenStack deployments with 34% running within companies that employ more than 1,000 people.</p><p>Intriguingly, unlike the server market, so far enterprises don't seem to be graduating to Red Hat from Canonical's Ubuntu. Is this a trend?</p><h2>The State Of Open Stack In 2014</h2><p>This year more than 5,000 people showed up to the OpenStack conference, and 1,780 people filled out a survey that drills into how they're using OpenStack. Many of the respondents (60%) came from companies that employ fewer than 500 people, while a dwindling percentage was derived from users at companies that employ more than 1,000 people, compared to the <a href="http://www.openstack.org/blog/2013/11/openstack-user-survey-october-2013/">October 2013 user survey</a>&nbsp;(34%, down from 39%).</p><p>This almost certainly reflects an increase in the overall OpenStack ecosystem, and not diminishing interest from larger companies.</p><p>This skew toward smaller companies, however, may help to explain why production deployments also tend to skew relatively small:</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2813950018266"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAyMjIxNzA1NTcxNjA5.png" /></figure></div><p>One thing is clear: Canonical's Ubuntu Linux currently dominates the OpenStack cloud.</p><h2>Is this Ubuntu's Game To Lose?</h2><p>The percentage of companies using Ubuntu is actually in decline, though it's not clear the decline is meaningful. In the October 2013 survey, 55% of those running production deployments were running Ubuntu. Today, that number is 53%, but this gap falls within the survey's margin of error.</p><p>At 55%, Ubuntu's OpenStack dominance is close to Red Hat's dominance of the data center, which is 64%, according to IDC.&nbsp;</p><p>However, as Neil Levine argues, it may be too soon to draw any conclusions. Levine sits in an interesting position, given that he formerly ran Canonical's enterprise business and currently is vice president of products at <a href="http://www.inktank.com/">Inktank</a>, which Red Hat announced an agreement to acquire:</p><p>Even so, the driving business reasons for turning to OpenStack plays perfectly to Canonical's story:&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b28139a0038266"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAyMjIzNTg0NjE5ODAx.png" /></figure></div><h2>Red Hat Clouds The Ubuntu Picture</h2><p>Ubuntu's momentum will also be impacted by Red Hat's decision to selectively support Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on rival OpenStack distributions. Though&nbsp;<a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303851804579560290024021158">The Wall Street Journal</a>initially reported&nbsp;that Red Hat wouldn't support RHEL customers running on <em>any</em>&nbsp;alternative OpenStack distributions, Red Hat executive Paul Cormier has since <a href="https://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2014/5/on-openstack-and-open-source">clarified</a> the issue, stipulating that "users are free to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux with any OpenStack offering, and there is no requirement to use our OpenStack technologies to get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription."</p><p>Well, not exactly.</p><p>Cormier goes on to call out its work with competitors that share its ability to deliver an "enterprise-class experience," given "engineering teams and a quality assurance process that we feel comfortable with." This suggests Red Hat likely won't support alternative OpenStack distributions that don't meet its quality standards.</p><p>Ultimately, however, Red Hat is always going to privilege its own distribution given the "tight feature and fix alignment between the Kernel, the hypervisor, and OpenStack services" that Red Hat's integration provides. This isn't surprising, though some have seen Red Hat's end-to-end approach is anti-competitive.</p><h2>Blocking And Tackling Ubuntu</h2><p>Red Hat's approach may not be anti-competitive, but it <em>is</em> anti-competitor.&nbsp;It's an anti-open source move by Red Hat, but it strikes me as simply a way for Red Hat to increase its competitive differentiation while remaining true to open source.</p><p>As much as some may grouse, the reality is that <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/12/27/openstack-red-hat#feed=/search?keyword=openstack&amp;awesm=~oEnh5SknGAWIMr">OpenStack has needed a dominant vendor</a> for some time: someone to help drive development in a way that benefits real-world customers, not merely science projects.</p><p>All of this means that life in OpenStack Land is suddenly very interesting. Ubuntu leads by a considerable margin in production deployments—but that's today. But whether it can maintain that lead will depend on its ability to build up an ecosystem to rival Red Hat's. In the data center, it's way behind. But in the OpenStack cloud, it's a much more even playing field, with Canonical recently <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/canonical-juju-devops-tool-coming-to-centos-and-windows-7000029418/">expanding</a> its partner footprint with Microsoft, IBM and others.</p><p>It's a new market. Canonical hasn't won anything yet, of course, but this is the most level playing field it's had in a decade. Game on.</p><p><em>Lead image courtesy of <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ahockley/">Aaron Hockley on Flickr</a></em></p>Ubuntu hopes it can maintain its OpenStack lead against Red Hat.http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/openstack-ubuntu-red-hat-linux-deployments
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/openstack-ubuntu-red-hat-linux-deploymentsCloudFri, 16 May 2014 10:31:00 -0700Matt AsayRed Hat May Be Stacking The Deck Against Its OpenStack Rivals<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>OpenStack is an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services for building and managing public and private clouds. The key is that it’s open—you can compile, manage and customize the OpenStack code yourself, or you can contract with vendors who will do that for you. And you can run it on any computing platform you like.</p><p>At least that’s what people expect in the open source world.&nbsp;Red Hat, though, may have other ideas.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/12/27/openstack-red-hat">Why OpenStack Needs Red Hat</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>The open-source vendor makes its money primarily by offering service to corporate customers who run their businesses on Red Hat's version of the Linux operating system. But it <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303851804579560290024021158">stepped into an open-source buzzsaw</a> earlier this week when an internal Red Hat document surfaced that suggested the company is trying to block its Linux customers from using competing (i.e., non-Red Hat) versions of OpenStack.</p><p>Exactly what Red Hat is up to isn't fully clear. Its rivals worry that it's disadvantaging other OpenStack providers by tying support of its Linux systems to use of Red Hat's OpenStack implementation. But it's also still possible, if increasingly unlikely, that Red Hat is simply making clear that it won't support rival OpenStack setups—saying, in effect, that its customers are free to do what they want, but that Red Hat won't help out if those OpenStack deployments go awry.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2014/01/06/why-red-hat-needs-openstack-and-aws">Why Red Hat Needs OpenStack</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Red Hat could clear up those concerns with a few simple, unadorned sentences. Unfortunately, everything it's said to date has mostly just muddied the waters further. Here's what we know at this point.</p><h2>Painting A Bullseye On Mirantis</h2><p>The first company in Red Hat's crosshairs appears to be Mirantis, an OpenStack pioneer that <a href="http://www.mirantis.com/company/press-center/company-news/ericsson-red-hat-and-sap-ventures-back-mirantis-with-investment/">Red Hat backed as part of a $10 million funding round</a>&nbsp;almost a year ago. That investment, however, hasn't kept the companies close.&nbsp;According to an internal and confidential FAQ obtained by ReadWrite, Red Hat has instructed its workforce to take a hard line against Mirantis OpenStack running running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL):</p><blockquote><p>Do not work with Mirantis. They are a Red Hat competitor. We should not engage them jointly with any customers or leverage their services for delivery of our products. Be very clear with customers that RHEL is not supported as a guest on Mirantis OpenStack, and that Mirantis OpenStack is not supported running on RHEL.</p></blockquote><p>That document, which apparently dates back to last November, effectively asserts that Red Hat won't support desktop computers and other clients running RHEL if used in conjunction with Mirantis OpenStack.&nbsp;Its author also trash-talked Mirantis OpenStack:</p><blockquote><p>Mirantis OpenStack is a compile-and-ship distribution of OpenStack bits that installs on an unoptimized Linux operating system. Mirantis also makes downstream modifications to enhance the performance of their proprietary toolset, at the expense of upstream compatibility. Mirantis contributes to OpenStack only at the margins: Hadoop on OpenStack and hooks into their toolset. They have no credibility in supporting Linux or fixing issues that occur in the Linux part of an OpenStack environment. Mirantis is a services company that is shipping a product to enable its services.</p></blockquote><p>The Wall Street Journal <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303851804579560290024021158">cited the internal memo in a recent story</a>&nbsp;and quoted Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer Martin Fink accusing Red Hat of "taking the art of closed open source tactics to a new level."</p><p>Red Hat responded to the WSJ story with a <a href="https://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2014/5/on-openstack-and-open-source">muddled blog post by Paul Cormier</a>, president of product and technology at Red Hat. Cormier reaffirmed Red Hat's open source philosophy and insisted that talk of "closed open source" amount to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt">FUD</a> spread by Red Hat's rivals.&nbsp;Yet he somehow managed not to clearly state whether Red Hat will support customers who use other flavors of OpenStack.</p><p>While Cormier wrote this—</p><blockquote><p>To be clear, users are free to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux with any OpenStack offering, and there is no requirement to use our OpenStack technologies to get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.</p></blockquote><p>—students of logic might notice that his statement stops short of affirming that Red Hat will honor its support agreement if customers opt for rival OpenStack technologies instead. More on this point in a moment.</p><h2>Who's Next?</h2><p>Members of the OpenStack Foundation, a developer organization that oversees the project, reacted with alarm to the notion that Red Hat might be wielding its clout in the paid Linux market, where it holds a 64% share, as a weapon. Some commenters likened its attack on Mirantis to Microsoft's crushing of Netscape almost two decades ago, after the software giant tied its Internet Explorer browser to Windows to ensure its ubiquity.</p><p>Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel told me it's extremely difficult for Red Hat customers to run non-Red Hat distributions of OpenStack on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It requires specific patches, and if you apply these patches, you invalidate your support contract,” Ionel said. “Red Hat wants to leverage their OS dominance, and they're taking a page from the Microsoft playbook—integrating OpenStack into the OS, so companies get better value when they use RHEL.”</p><p>Which might be great for Red Hat customers who use just Red Hat software—just not so much for those who want features found in rival OpenStack distributions.</p><h2>Red Hat vs. Red Hat</h2><p>HP, which also competes with Red Hat's OpenStack implementation, also wants Red Hat to clarify exactly what it's up to, per this <a href="http://www8.hp.com/hpnext/posts/why-open-open-cloud-matters#.U3UD12Xn-M8">blog post by CTO Martin Fink</a>:</p><blockquote><p>It’s not clear whether Red Hat is drawing an artful distinction between deployment, subscription and support, or if Red Hat will actually provide support for RHEL to customers who don’t use Red Hat OpenStack technologies with RHEL. Therefore, I would encourage Red Hat to confirm whether it will support RHEL if a customer is running a non-Red Hat version of an OpenStack offering on that copy of RHEL.</p></blockquote><p>It turns out that Red Hat may have the freedom to withhold support if it wants. An <a href="http://www.redhat.com/licenses/GLOBAL_Appendix_One_English_20131001.pdf">appendix</a> to Red Hat’s support contract notes the following:</p><blockquote><p>Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported solely when used as the host operating system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform or when used as the guest operating system on virtual machines created and managed with this Subscription.... Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently the only supported operating system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.</p></blockquote><p>Similar language appears several times throughout the appendix in sections related to licenses for Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure without guest OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes. It suggests that Red Hat could withhold RHEL support from customers using alternative OpenStack implementations without violating its support agreement. Also, if you recall the loophole in the earlier statement by Red Hat's Paul Cormier—well, it's also consistent with that.</p><p>When I asked Red Hat to explain its stance on RHEL support in plain English, the company send me yet another oblique, jargon-laden statement, this time from Tim Yeaton, Red Hat's senior VP for infrastructure. I've included at the end of the post in its entirety. Feel free to scroll down and read it at your leisure; suffice to say, it's not terribly enlightening.</p><h2>The Closing Of OpenStack, Maybe</h2><p>OpenStack advocates fear that Red Hat can sow some serious damage if it plays hardball this way. "It makes non-Red Hat OpenStack vendors less competitive against OpenStack alternatives, which they might lose to now unless an alternative to RHEL-level support appears," Dave Nielsen, a cloud-computing evangelist and consultant, whose former clients include HP and Mirantis, <a href="http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/foundation/2014-May/001680.html">wrote in the OpenStack Foundation forum</a>.</p><p>Unsurprisingly, Red Hat's competitors are playing up the controversy for all it's worth.&nbsp;Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux company Canonical, told me that in this week's OpenStack Summit Survey, five out of six "super user" profiles were building their clouds with Ubuntu. The other was on CentOS.</p><p>To Shuttleworth, that's an indication that companies are "comfortable with a move away from RHEL for this new era of Linux," he told me via email. "RHEL's lock on mindshare for mission critical Linux is coming to an end."</p><p>Of course, Shuttleworth has been <a href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072">saying much the same thing for years</a>. But if Red Hat is starting to play the heavy in open source, you never know—it might finally turn out to be true.</p><h2>Red Hat's Latest Statement</h2><p>As promised above, here's that statement from Red Hat VP Tim Yeaton:</p><blockquote></blockquote><p>RHEL guests are certified to hypervisor platforms, such as KVM, not to OpenStack per se. OpenStack is the control layer that manages multiple hypervisors, and KVM is the default.</p><p>RHEL guests are certified to run on other supported hypervisors, such as those from VMWare and Microsoft, based on established support relationships.</p><p>In the case of RHEL OSP, we in turn support other guest OS' on our embedded KVM, based on the providers' ability to provide mission critical support in partnership with us. Under this model, we support guests today including Windows and SUSE Linux, since both have large software development and support organizations, as well as support relationships with us.</p><p>Since we are in the business of building mission-critical cloud infrastructure, delivering on stringent SLAs for enterprise customers based on RHEL, KVM, and OpenStack, we must take responsibility for enterprise-readiness and supportability of our RHEL guests on other vendors' hypervisors within their OpenStack platforms, and the underlying Linux that is being used within them. Our ability to fully and confidently support customers' mission-critical environments—top-to-bottom—is paramount, particularly in on-premises private cloud deployments where the underlying technologies are complex. The expertise and experience to do this for OpenStack customers was built via our nearly two decades of experience with RHEL in mission-critical customer environments.</p><p>Everything clear now?</p><p>Nielsen, the OpenStack evangelist, said he found Red Hat's statements confounding. After reading them over and over, he said Red Hat seems to be differentiating between the hypervisor and the OpenStack platform, which "technically is bullshit. They can make that distinction because it sounds different, but technically, it's not. Then the question comes down to are they going to have support for, or work out an arrangement with any other partners?"<br tml-linebreak="true" /></p><p>I asked Red Hat one more question: Does Red Hat have relationships with any OpenStack vendor similar to the relationships with Microsoft and VMware at the hypervisor level? Red Hat provided a response from Yeaton: "Not at this time."</p><p><em>Lead image of Red Hat executive Paul Cormier by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/redhatmagazine/4727897463/in/photolist-8cMHcv-8cR2ef-4WSPEi-aoU6EJ-gZrc1k-7sqHoY-7AEgXC-7AAvgK-7AAvmn-7AAvjg-8NsjsZ-7J8J8D-4WQFhp-4WQF7D-7CdJQs-eUwhYY-byGdhy-daqRVF-dWs3KY-2obz47-aag4Ti">Flickr user Red Hat</a>, CC 2.0</em></p><p><em>Update: An earlier version of this story neglected to mention that Dave Nielsen is a former consultant for HP and Mirantis.</em></p>It may be pulling a Microsoft-style lock-in to promote its own version of OpenStack at the expense of open-source rivals.http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/red-hat-openstack-mirantis-rhel-support
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/16/red-hat-openstack-mirantis-rhel-supportCloudFri, 16 May 2014 06:05:00 -0700Jodi Mardesich